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Comment Re:That's how you deal with Big Business (Score 1) 339

First of all, Free speech, as any natural human right, is restricted when it is considered to cause harm to other people. Different countries and cultures have different definitions of which speech causes harm and consequently restrict different kinds of speech. For example the USA (a good example because they declare themselves the champions of free speech), forbids the following classes of speech:

- obscenity,
- defamation,
- incitement,
- incitement to riot or imminent lawless action,
- fighting words,
- fraud,
- speech covered by government granted monopoly (copyright),
- speech integral to criminal conduct

So, regarding the brazilian case, I don't know if the allegations on the video are true of not, but that doesn't matter at this point because the candidate, as any other, has the natural human right to be considered innocent until proven guilty, and making such allegations right before the elections cause irreparable harm to the election process and consequently to the whole population of the city. If he is guilty of something, the right thing to do is to present the suspicions to the authorities for investigation, not to hold them for months/years in order to take a cheep blow to his campaign.

Comment Re:But that's not the real problem. (Score 1) 1651

I'm not from there, but I applaud their justice system. It seams obvious to me that someone who opts to operate heavy machinery on a very public setting have to assume all the responsibilities that entails. A person walking or cycling should never be blamed for being crushed by such machinery, the operator bears all the blame.

Comment Re:save trillions (Score 1) 186

What if, instead of letting it re-entry in a few years, they pushed it beyond LEO just to be used as a base for a new one. Even without the proper shielding most of the hardware would be useful, they just need need some new habitat modules and some replacement for the more radiation sensitive equipment.

Comment Re:save trillions (Score 1) 186

I don't think the ISS would take structural damage from a VASIMR propulsion for two reasons:
  1. The thrust from a VASIMR would be very weak, it is more of a slow and steady kind of engine.
  2. It was designed to be “pushed around”, I believe (I may be wrong here) they even used the main thrusters of the space shuttle to adjust its orbit sometimes.

Now, regarding the radiation belts you may have a point. They could evacuate the station before passing troug them, but then, the radiation there would probably fry some/most of the station's electronics.

Comment Re:Brazilian Nonsense (Score 1) 339

Fines are OK in civil cases, like if someone breaks a contract or copyright infringment. The “not taking the video down” is not a civil case, it is a criminal one. Every minute Google Brasil exec's refuse to take it down they are committing an election crime, that is irreparable harm to the election process and can't be fixed by a slap in the wrist (fine).

Google Brasil's president arrest warrant was not issued because “someone uploaded a video”, it was issued because “he refused to comply with a court order to stop showing the illegal video”, that is a crime in progress.

Comment Re:That's how you deal with Big Business (Score 2) 339

The moment this “specific Brazilian Google President” chose to violate a court order to keep an illegal video online he is responsible.

The same way, if someone advertised illegal stuff (lets say drugs) on ebay, and they refused to take it down even after a court order, they would be breaking the law and facing arrest as well.

Comment In Linux drivers, Intel is still king. (Score 4, Interesting) 161

AMD may be getting its shit together when in regards to chip design. but I'm still going Intel on my next PC because of their superior Linux drivers. At the moment I'm an unhappy owner of a laptop with a AMD graphics card that can't do anything because the drivers are useless. I'm looking forward to a new laptop with an Intel Ivy Bridge processor (I don't think I can wait Haskell).

Comment Re:Well... (Score 1) 404

Although companies have mostly the same legal rights as persons, we must be careful not to think of them as persons. A company cannot be not loyal or empathic, it does not have moral. Any promise made by a company is worthless unless it is a written contract, the company is not a moral being and can change its "mind" quite easily, without any remorse or guilty conscience.

Comment Re:Can't use it like one connection (Score 1) 152

I'm sure Windows supports this as well, all of which is out of the box, with the addition of some settings.

There is no easy way of doing it on Linux. You must be confusing it with interface bonding which binds two or more interfaces in the same local network, this is supported on the kernel for years and recently has been added to network manager. Interface bonding does not work to link two different internet connections.

To use multiple connections on Linux you would need a very complicated setup redirecting all traffic from both connections trough some kind of custom vpn server.

Comment Re:Well... (Score 1) 404

... and generally you can use psychology to determine future actions of a company just as easily as you can that of a person.

This is flat out wrong, you can't use psychology to determine future actions of a company (unless it is a small family company managed completely by one guy of course)

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